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If Microsoft Built Cars...
trystanu writes "If Microsoft Built Cars, occasionally your car would just die on the motorway for no reason; you'd
accept this, restart and drive on -- at least that was the joke a few years ago. ZDNET reports that Microsoft has persuaded a number of carmakers to use its slimmed-down Windows CE operating system to power a variety of in-car electronics, from navigation systems to music players to information devices. BMW, in particular, has gravitated to Microsoft systems, although the company has announced wins with Honda, Volvo and others as well. Perhaps the recent trapping of Thai dignitaries inside a BMW should be a warning to us all."
Black Pavement of Death
So long as they don't use Windows for the car security system, I mean imagine... "Insert any key to begin"
BMW's come with what amounts to an EULA. If you look under the hood, you'll notice a little sticker that says you are not to connect any third party electronics to the car, CB, ham radio, etc, or even use a hand-held cell phone within the car, unless you buy a BMW approved carphone. This is under threat of voiding your warantee.
I'm sure in the US there's some protection offered under the same law that forces manufacturers to allow you to use aftermarket parts, but I don't know if that precedent would extend to electronics equipment that isn't really part of the car.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I currently have to hard boot my Dell Axim X5 after roughly 2-3 hours depending on the app that locked (RealOne Player, X-Lite (SIP Phone), etc..). I think CE/PPC is still too unstable for possible life threatening experiences in the car.
Reading that story from Singapore puzzles me. Does it strike anyone here as silly to have car locks that are controlled entirely electronically? I mean, power locks are great, don't get me wrong. But since they are by necessity mechanical anyway, so doesn't it make sense to provide a manual, mechanical means to lock and unlock them? Doing otherwise just seems like you're placing unnecessary trust in imperfect electronics.
Security updates for you car will be availible on the internet. Failure to update voids all warrenties.
Too bad he wasn't driving a BMW with an iDrive system, but an earlier BMW. It was a catastrophic electrical system failure that locked him in the car.
3 ,3 9130270,00.htm
http://asia.cnet.com/newstech/systems/0,3900115
I forget...are we at war with Eurasia or East Asia?
Quite frankly this concerns me.. all joking aside, Microsoft has yet to prove itself in the reliability stakes. Plain and simple.
Their handheld / 'CE' operating systems are no different, and quite simply I wouldn't knowingly buy a car where the majority of its tricks and gizmo's were Microsoft powered.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Microsoft Technology Hits the Road in BMW 7 Series:
"Perhaps the recent trapping of Thai dignitaries inside a BMW should be a warning to us all."
Did you actually read the article????
It starts with this paragraph
BMW has told CNETAsia that an electronic fault caused the problem, rather than a system crash of the car's Windows-based central computer, as other reports have speculated.
and ends with
But when contacted by CNETAsia, a spokeswoman from BMW Thailand said the car at fault was a 10-year old BMW 520i that had suffered a simple electronic failure.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
A Software Engineer, a Hardware Engineer and a Departmental Manager were on their way to a meeting in Switzerland. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of control down the road, bouncing off the crash barriers, until it miraculously ground to a halt scraping along the mountainside. The car's occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a problem: they were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no rakes. What were they to do?
"I know", said the Departmental Manager, "Let's have a meeting, propose a Vision, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals, and by a process of Continuous Improvement, Change Management, Re-Engineering and Service Integration, find a solution to the Critical Problems, and we can be on our way."
"No, no", said the Hardware Engineer, "That will take far too long, and besides, that method has never worked before. I've got my Swiss Army knife with me, and in no time at all I can strip
down the car's braking system, isolate the fault, fix it, and we can be on our way."
"Well", said the Software Engineer, "Before we do anything, I think we should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again."
Blue Screen of Your Face Going Through The Windshield.
Stop: 0X0000000A (0X00000000, 0X00000002, 0X00000001, 0X80448BF6)
IRQL_NOT_LESS OR EQUAL
Adress 80448BF6 base at 80400000, DateStamp
3d366b8b - brake.exe
Beginning dump of physical facial bones
It wasn't the car's fault, it was bad drivers.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Ironically, 50,000 people die every year from Automobile accidents and no one looks to blame Ford or GM for these deaths.
It's probably not too far off to say 99.9% of Windows crashing problems are due to operator error from installing bad drivers (from other manufacterers), installing bad hardware, installing crappy software.
If GM made Windows, it would not be upgradable, it would run 1950's technology, it would cost $20000 every 5 years, and it would STILL CRASH!
Not a Microsocks fan, but it's funny how narrowminded some can be...
torved
I came to Athens and no one knew me. - Democritus
Near Heidelberg/Germany there seems to be a bump in a highway that causes some BMW firmware to crash everytime a BMW runs over it, with the same effect as reported in the second article: the engine stops, the doors and windows are locked and the occupants are trapped. Fortunately people don't need to wait long, because there's usually a local breakdown service waiting to rescue the drivers. Interesting business idea :)
The car was still operational, though, so I drove to a friend's house and eventually got their attention. Two hours later a locksmith finally got me out. In the mean time I had to sit through each passerby feeling compelled to go around the car and try every door, and then signal me to pull up on the lock. As if somehow no one had yet thought of that. It was a bit like waiting for an elevator, where each new arrival feels the need to press the button.
MANUAL OVERRIDE
Isn't it ironic... most cars now have latches to let kids and gangsters out of trunks, yet now you can't get out of the car when its OS freezes? Good grief!
How many times has the Enterprise been saved (or blown up to kill bad guys) through the use of manual overrides? I should be able to get out of my car, even if the battery is drained and the computer is drained. If it's good enough for Jean Luc, it's good enough for me!
Embedded != Embedded. MS products maybe used in cars, but largely in the "infotainment" sector.
WinCE is much too big for the tiny microcontrollers that control engines, breakes, gear shifts and so on.. As is Java.
If you want to really what going on in car electronics look for example for the OSEK/VDX initiative, a consortium of german and french carmakers.
True story: In the mid 70's in Egypt, the u.s. ambassador was using a souped-up car that had been confiscated form a drug dealer as his official car. It was perfect for the job: bulletproof, had hidden sirens and lights, plus a megaphone and tear gas for crowd control (and being free was something the government liked, too). One day a critical fuse blew and they were trapped, just like the Thai ministers... it took a lot of energy to break through the bulletproof glass, but they eventually got him out.
Solution to the problem? A fire ax became standard equipment in the back seat of that car.
I never got to see the car, but I always imagined it as totally pimp-rific.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
What is the difference between final control in Japanese and Yugoslav car factory?
In Japan they put a cat in the car and seal the doors. Tomorrow if the cat is still alive that means that sealing is not good because air managed to get in.
In Yugoslavia we also put a cat in the car but tomorrow we check is the cat still in the car or she managed to escape.
--
No cats were harm during posting this message.
Had a BMW 850CSi a few years ago. It had those frameless windows which drop a bit when you pull on the door handle so you can open the door. I wasn't amused when the electronics decided to suddenly activate that mechanism INSIDE THE CAR WASH. But that wasn't all. One day, I open the door, sit down on the driver's seat and the moment I turn the key, the car decides to move the driver's seat aaaaallll the way forward and pushes me against the steering wheel. I couldn't get out and had some trouble reaching the controls from that position.
;-)
Anyway, the chicks liked that car.
Yes, with Auto-DRM, the car industry will be able to regain lost profits from those horrible people sharing cars!
Only YOU will be able to drive your car, and if your friends or family want to drive it, they will have to purchase a seperate licence from the manufacturer!
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
When it becomes obvious that tires are shredding and rolling over, people do. When it becomes obvious that cars are exploding upon a slight rear collision, people do. When cars that are supposed to protect their drivers in a collision instead drive the steering column through their chest, people do.
It's pretty obvious that, for example, when the Windows installer crashes, or a fresh copy of IIS has to be rebooted every 2 weeks despite serving only static HTML, that Windows is somehow at fault. Not only is Windows instability legendary, it is also well documented. Hardware cannot be the issue, because that hardware could be running another OS and have years of uptime. Drivers should not be the issue for the same reason. If the drivers are both put out by the same company, they should have the same level of overall quality.
GM has made an OS... Its cars have been running on microcontrollers for years. They run on the smallest of processors, they can be upgraded for about $100 by replacing a ROM, and they never crash. If you had meant what a horrible mess it would be for GM to attempt to create a desktop operating system, then yes, I agree with you. However, that should extend to any company attempting to do something significant in a field that they don't have experience in.
If Microsoft decided to do this properly by hiring the best kernel developers and experienced automotive programmers, and creating a real-time OS from scratch, people might be persuaded that this was a good idea. But they're not. They're taking an OS made for convincing a printer to communicate with a text processor, and trying to force it into making an antilock braking system communicate with a real-time traction control system.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather use an OS specifically designed for reliability if I'm going to spend two hours a day inside something that kills 50,000 people per year.
The ______ Agenda
I can just imagine the look on the dealer's face.
Never at a loss for words... because of the voices.
9/11 was caused by poor airline security and lax regulation and oversight.
NO. NO NO NO NO!!!!. The terrorists took over using friggin' BOX KNIVES! I, for one, do NOT want to see the level of paranoid security that would be required to prevent someone from carrying a tiny razor-blade sized knife on board. The best weapon the terrorists had was deceit. They had the passengers convinced that all that was going to happen was that the plane was going to be forced to land somewhere and then negotiations would begin for hostage release. Under those expectations, the risk of being stabbed with the knives wasn't worth engaging in any heroics. In the one case where the news was already out, and the element of deceit was lost, the passengers did decide to overpower the terrorists' wimpy arsenel of box knifes. The same thing would likely have happened on the other three flights if they too had known what was going to happen if they sat still.
Don't blame airline security. Blame excessive optimism on the part of the passengers.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
With wifi catching on, and with MS software being central in a car's brain, the possibilties are endless.
People will have their cars recalled 3-4 times a year to apply the latest patch.
You might have viruses that spread from car to car.
There'll be the IloveYou kind of virus, or blaster kind of virus, that will shut down traffic and cause millions of accidents within hours of release to the wild.
There's the jerusalem style of virus that will crash all cars on the planet at a predetermined time.
There'll be backdoors and IRC robots, where the script kiddies in stead of trying to shut down a web site in a DDDOS attack, will instead take control over cars, and use real people as objects in a videogame.
Or more innocent viruses that hijacks a car's stereo, and starts blasting Wang Chung at full volume.
Scary. The scariest part is that this is not crazy science fiction. By all signs, I don't see that any of this is avoidable, given MS current dominance, their awful track record on security, and the extremely weak consumer protection laws.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.